The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to an apparatus and method for digital rights management and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to digital rights management for images, video and artistic works in general, particularly digital art.
DRM solutions are often necessary when trying to protect the IP of the media creator. In images and art initially created in digital format, DRM is particularly necessary as it defends, not a copy of the work but the work itself.
Media files (for example JPG and PNG for images, MPEG variants for video) are usually delivered to consumers in a compressed form, and it is common practice to encode the compressed bit-stream using common encryption methods such as AES (with key-delivery mechanisms not covered here).
However, as the playback mechanism operates, it has to decode the bit-stream before decompressing it, giving attackers a perfect sampling point, in which the plaintext bitstream exists, and can be copied, given the right means, without fully de-constructing the entire playback pipeline. The bitstream can be extracted and subsequently, when provided to a suitable decompressor, may provide a hacked version of the work.
Another convenient attack vector is to grab the fully decoded image (or images, in the case of video streams)—This is less desirable as it presents the attacker with a much higher volume of data to capture, and a “generation loss” with regards to the quality of the material, but it is a viable attack none the less.
The present embodiments are aimed at denying the above attacks and in general ensuring that there is no plaintext version of the work available to be hacked.